By sheer happenstance, the release date of Alphabet Soup: A Memoir in Letters coincided with my fiftieth birthday.
The period leading up to this double-barrelled day of significance was filled with the vagaries of life, such as nursing a sick child at home, the joys of the 2024 holiday season, and the sudden, unexpected passing of my high school best friend. In short, events unfolded with their mixed bag of good, bad, and ugly episodes that shape the steppingstones of a person’s life journey. Where our feet find firm foundation as we stride towards the future is, in large part, determined by the stories that guide us and the experiences that shape us. The events that happened in the book’s pre-release period were stark reminders of these realities.
Because of my reflections during that timeframe, the symbolism of using letter-writing as the vehicle for Alphabet Soup gained even greater substance for me.
In its way, the creative process was like an imagined do-over — an exercise in writing contemporaneously as my younger self to potently express things I wish I’d had the insight, self-awareness, or courage to say at the time. Consequently, each letter forges a literary time capsule preserved in ink. They each record interactions and engagements, thought processes and emotional responses, as I uniquely experienced them.
The dialogue, therefore, is imperfect in its one-sidedness — curiosity about how people on the other side of these missives might react may naturally come to mind. The beguiling part is that the reader does not know the identity (or identities) of the letter’s subject(s). This double silence, of both who the antagonists are and what they might have said or done in response, gives plenty of room for emotional imputation and interpretation. A reader can graft their own personal experiences and ideas onto the writing and conjure meaning from the letters that makes unique sense to them.
The aim is for this manner of textual communication to speak specifically and broadly simultaneously. The wordplay, imagery, double entendre and metaphor in the letters become tools for others to reconsider their own complex realities in juxtaposition to the ones presented on the page.
The date of release is very specific in its significance to me while also being an invitation to readers to see themselves in the universal themes the book explores. In that way, the coincidence of Alphabet Soup: A Memoir in Letters being released on my fiftieth birthday is an unintended encapsulation of what the book seeks to achieve.
After all — the most consequential coincidences do not come to pass by happenstance.
A. Gregory Frankson has published four poetry collections and contributed to six anthologies. His latest book, Alphabet Soup: A Memoir in Letters, released on January 28, 2025. He is a former Canadian national poetry slam champion, an inductee to the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour, and a former on-air poetic commentator on CBC Radio One in Toronto. Greg is based in Toronto.